Introduced by David Thomson Wilder thumbs his nose at prohibitions of all sorts in this one, mixing slapstick and screwball, gangster film and musical into a racy, transvestite farce. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are two Prohibition-era jazz musicians on the run from gangland Chicago. They don convincing drag, sign on with a touring, all-woman band featuring the singer Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), and experience the joy and pain of being two of the girls. In Miami, Lemmon, still in drag, turns his attentions to lascivious millionaire Joe E. Brown, while Curtis uses impotence as a lure for the caring side of Sugar Kane. The audacity of this film's thinly veiled sexuality, both hetero- and homosexual, seems the more remarkable as the years go by. All the principals are at their comic best, in self-reflexive portrayals of their screen alter-egos-Lemmon as an aggressively temperamental woman, Curtis as a poor-man's Cary Grant, and Monroe's sweetness shining through an intelligent parody of The Blonde.